By Jo Glover The conversation you keep putting off If you lead a team in health, you already know the one. The staff member whose behaviour has been sliding for months. The clinician everyone quietly works around. The pattern that has become “just how they are.” You have probably had the conversation in your head a hundred times. You just haven’t had it out loud. That gap is where culture erodes. In the GRIP Framework, People sits across everything. Your governance, your resources and your...
26 days ago • 3 min read
By Jo Glover I Started as a Chemist. Here's What My Thinking Profile Revealed About 25 Years of Leading in Health. This is the first in a short series I'm exploring over the coming weeks — blending what I've learned across two decades of health operations leadership with some new thinking. It's about how we think, how that shapes the way we lead, and what becomes possible when we understand ourselves a little better. I hope it's useful. I didn't plan to work in health operations. I planned to...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
By Jo Glover The Framework Holding Your Service Together (even when it doesn't feel like it) Most operational leaders I speak to right now aren't struggling because they lack commitment. They're struggling because they can't see the whole picture at once and feel like they are firefighting all the time. There's a governance issue over here. A workforce gap over there. Data they don't have time to read. A team that needs more from them than they have left to give. And somewhere underneath all...
2 months ago • 3 min read
By Jo Glover Late in 2025, I completed Brené Brown's Dare to Lead workshop alongside leaders from different organisations and industries. By mid-morning on day one, I noticed something I recognised immediately. On paper we were all very different. Different sectors, different roles, different contexts. But the weight we were carrying? Almost identical. Significant responsibility, limited resources, complex stakeholders, and people looking to us for steadiness in the middle of uncertainty. And...
3 months ago • 4 min read
By Jo Glover The Meeting Overload Problem Look at most health operations leaders’ calendars right now and you will see back-to-back meetings from early morning until late afternoon. And yet decisions are still slow. Actions are rolling over. Staff are exhausted. And the real work — the thinking, the planning, the follow-up, the team support — keeps getting pushed to the edges of the day. We are busy. We are connected. We are coordinated. But we are not necessarily moving. That is the meeting...
3 months ago • 3 min read
By Jo Glover The 4 Cs of brave leadership There is a myth in leadership that holds many good people back. It is the idea that confidence comes first. That before we apply for the role, have the difficult conversation, lead the change, or step into something bigger, we should feel fully ready. But that is rarely how growth works. Most of us do not start with confidence. We start with uncertainty. We start with doubt. We start with that uncomfortable feeling of not quite knowing whether we can...
4 months ago • 3 min read
By Jo Glover Strategic Headspace: How Busy Mid-Level Leaders Can Carve Out Time to Think (Without Dropping the Ball) I was in a busy Operations Director role and wanted to take my next step and the feedback I received was ‘I am too operational and could not understand as I thought I was strategic but then one day it dawned on me - I was always looking ‘into’ the services and never outside at the bigger picture! If you are a mid-level health or government leader, your week probably starts...
4 months ago • 6 min read
The Health Operations Playbook By Jo-Glover Edition 9: Proximity: It matters more than we think! Proximity matters! We often think growth comes from more knowledge. Another course. Another framework. Another book. But sometimes growth comes from something much simpler — and much more powerful. Who you are close to. The people around us shape what feels normal, what feels possible, and what standard we hold ourselves to. In leadership, that matters more than we often realise. As Jim Rohn once...
5 months ago • 3 min read
The Health Operations Playbook By Jo-Glover Inbox@Zero: A 10‑minute habit for calmer leadership Hi [First name] If you opened this email already half-thinking about the 147 unread messages waiting for you, you are not alone. In health operations, inbox creep is quiet but relentless. It starts as a few unread emails on a Monday and becomes a three-digit wall of noise by Friday. Somewhere in between, your focus, energy, and decision-making bandwidth disappear. Most leaders I work with do not...
5 months ago • 2 min read